The Joyful Botanist: A smile for the briars
Greenbriers have creamy white flowers in springtime, and their fruits ripen to a blueish black. Adam Bigelow photo
I get asked questions a lot about plants, nature and the woods. People will walk up to me, take out their phones and show me a picture of a leaf or flower they found on their last hike or growing in their back yard and ask, “Hey Adam, what’s this plant?” I love it when this happens, every time. It brings a big smile to my face and joy to my heart.
I call it the “What’s that plant” game, and it’s one of my favorite games to play. So, if you happen to see me out in the world, and you wonder if I wouldn’t mind, know that the answer is most always a yes, I’d be happy to try and help figure it out.
I’m often asked about the vines growing in people’s backyards and on their wooded property. They want to know if they are hurting the trees and if they should pull them all down. It depends on if the vines are native or if they are exotic and/or invasive meaning they did not evolve in Southern Appalachia.
If they are exotic, meaning if they were brought in recently from a different part of the world, vining plants in natural areas tend to cause harm to not only the individual plants they climb but to the ecosystem as a whole. Invasive vines like English ivy (Hedera helix), bittersweet weed (Celastrus orbiculatus) and sweet autumn clematis (Clematis terniflora) not only cause harm to what they climb, but they also spread rapidly into the ecosystem.
Vines that grew up around here, grew up in community with everything else that evolved in this ecosystem, including the trees and shrubs that they climb, mostly play well with their neighbors. If they were bad for the plants they use for support, then either the vine or the tree would have gone extinct long ago. It’s hard to imagine the millions of years of co-evolution that native vines and native trees have shared, and invasive plants have only been around for a few hundred years comparatively.
One of my favorite vines that even many native plant enthusiasts have a hard time embracing are plants in the genus Smilax. These are the brier plants, the thorny ones. The plants that bite back. Greenbrier, sawbrier, catbrier are what they mostly are called. Other descriptive common names in this genus are carrion flower, horsebrier, bullbrier, hellfetter and tramp’s trouble.
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Greenbriers are beautiful plants. They have creamy white flowers in springtime, and their fruits ripen to a blueish black. Most all of them are woody, meaning they’re above ground all year long and regrow from old tissue come springtime. Most smilax also have thorns. Big ones that hurt and rip clothing and skin.
My advice is to leave greenbriers to grow in the woods. You can try to dig them out. I’ve tried. Their stems are skinny and so are the initial roots going into the ground. And then you meet the tubers that act as anchors in the soil. Tiny, fibrous roots below these lead to more tuber anchors. Every time you pull one of the tubers, two more grow. Cut or pull one of the stems above ground, and two more shoots grow from the wound or from the ground.
When they are growing into a pathway or toward a driveway, I like to encourage them to grow in a different direction by braiding them into the foliage. If you are intent on cutting them back, then you can cut. They’ll grow back. And then you cut the sprouts. Again, they’ll grow back. Just keep doing this over and over to keep them clear until you die. The greenbrier will grow right where it wanted to in the first place.
So, leave the native vines be. No need to cut them down. It’s better to embrace them and allow them to grow. But do that metaphorically. Those thorns hurt.
(The Joyful Botanist leads weekly wildflower walks most Fridays and offers consultations and private group tours through Bigelow’s Botanical Excursions. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
